Growing up in Danielson, Quiet Corner artist Normand Chartier was known for his athletic ability.

“I was just this ag-boy jock in high school,” the former football, basketball, baseball and track star said. “I was a very good athlete.”

The Brooklyn resident, now 67, didn’t dedicate himself to his true passion, graphic illustration and watercolor painting, until a football injury put him on the sidelines, nearly paralyzing him, while he was playing on a sports scholarship at UConn.

“The only other thing I really had leanings toward and talent for was art,” Chartier said. “Not many people knew I liked drawing and painting.”

Now, about 50 years later, Chartier is a celebrated children’s book illustrator and artist who was recently invited to become a member of one of the world’s largest and most prestigious museums in his field.

Being honored by The Mazza Museum in Findlay, Ohio, the largest museum in the world dedicated to children’s book illustrations, is a special way to cap his career, Chartier said.

“When I got the invitation to join in, I was just floored,” he said. “The selection is possibly the most satisfying validation and endorsement of the entire body of my work that I’ve ever received.”

That body of work includes illustrations for 76 children’s books, three of which he wrote; countless drawings and paintings for youth magazines; and a book of paintings featuring his Maine-inspired watercolors; all of which have won him numerous national and international accolades.

“I like to do animal characters,” Chartier said, and, true to form, many of the books he’s illustrated feature four-legged friends, including a happy-go-lucky pig called “Silly Fred,” one of his favorites — the popular story has been translated to four other languages.

Much of Chartier’s career — about 30 years — was spent as a freelance artist for Sesame Street, producing commercial products featuring Elmo, Big Bird, Bert, Ernie and the rest of Jim Henson’s colorful characters.

But now, computers have taken over the bulk of the design work at Sesame Street and elsewhere, and artists like Chartier have had to adapt or move on.

Chartier said he tried his hand at computer illustration, taking Photoshop courses, but it wasn’t for him.

“It’s just not my style,” he said. “I’m more of an old-fashioned, hands-on kind of person.”

Instead, in 2005, Chartier began a new chapter of his life in the town he’s called home since 1978, working as a paraprofessional at Brooklyn Elementary School.

“The bonus is, I really love working with kids,” said the father of four and grandfather of three. “I enjoy it very much. I really like working with the special-needs students.”

While Chartier still does occasional magazine illustrations, he now devotes the bulk of his time to working with the students, and to his watercolor paintings.

Page 2 of 3 - While Chartier said he loved doing the children’s book illustrations and commercial artwork, they were just that: work, a means of supporting his family. But painting, on the other hand, is a passion.

Chartier lights up as he talks about his yearly sojourns to Maine, where beautiful scenes of nature, from farmland to coastal fishing villages, fill him with inspiration.

Every summer, Chartier said, he rents cottages in the Southport Island area, located on the southern coast of Maine, in the mouth of the Sheepscot River.

“I just felt an urge to start painting the feeling that I got from being up there,” he said. “I guess I’m an addictive kind of guy. I got addicted to painting up there.”

That obsession paid off, when, in 2002, the publisher of some of Chartier’s children’s stories got wind of his Maine paintings and asked the artist to put together a book.

“My Maine, the Coastal Watercolors of Normand Chartier,” was published by Down East Books in 2005. It features more than 90 of his works spanning the last two decades, reflecting his love of the region and of painting itself.

“It was like a gift,” Chartier said of “My Maine,” which was selected by Publishers Weekly as a recommended art/gift book for 2005/2006.

As much as Chartier adores Maine, he’s a Quiet Corner native through and through, and has lived in northeastern Connecticut for all of his life, he said.

“We have some beautiful things around here,” he said. “One of the reasons I paint around here is I want to show people what they’re missing.”

It was in the Quiet Corner, while growing up one of 12 children in a French-speaking home in Danielson, that Chartier was first bitten by the art bug.

“When I was growing up, we always had really good children’s books at home,” Chartier said, crediting his father, a doctor, and mother, a classical violinist, with exposing him and his sisters to the quality items that, he later realized, influenced so much of his own work.

“I tell kids: have good things around you — good books and good movies — because these things will come back to help you,” he said. “I just shake my head and say, ‘These kids are not feeding themselves correctly,’ ” seeing the video games and other entertainment being consumed by today’s youth.

While there were no art classes at Killingly High School when Chartier was a student there, he began teaching himself after reading the book “Ways with Watercolor” by Ted Kautzky and watching a TV program by John Gnagy, known as America’s first television art teacher, who taught viewers how to draw.

Chartier describes his style as a mix of these two artists: “I’m a combination of John Gnagy and Ted Kautzky,” he said. “Your first influences really stick with you.”

Page 3 of 3 - But to his friends, family and fans around the world, Chartier is an original, which his invitation to join the illustrious ranks of The Mazza Museum proves.

Chartier said he’s planning to visit the Ohio museum that features so many of his heroes, including Robert McClosky, author of one of Chartier’s favorite children’s books, “Make Way for Ducklings.’’

“Many people (at Mazza) are classic artists that I adored as a child,” he said. “For me, it’ll be like nirvana seeing all the original art from these people.”